Former FEMA chief says he made desperate calls

KATRINA'S AFTERMATH

September 15, 2005|By David D. Kirkpatrick and Scott Shane, the New York Times

WASHINGTON -- Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card.

Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort, and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out-of-control" situation.

"I am having a horrible time," Brown said he told Chertoff and a White House official -- either Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin -- in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."

By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a hand basket" in Louisiana. A day later, Brown said he asked the White House to take over the response effort. He said he thought the subsequent appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces met the need for more federal help.

In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director Monday under intense criticism, Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response. "I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," he said.

He focused much of his criticism on Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes.

But his account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Chertoff, Card and Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, suggested that President Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.

A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Brown but did not think they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.

Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Chertoff acted aggressively enough in ratcheting up the response. Brown was removed by Chertoff last week from directing the relief effort. A 50-year-old lawyer and Republican activist who joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001, Brown said he had been hobbled by limitations on the power of the agency to command needed resources. With only 2,600 employees nationwide, he said, FEMA must rely on state workers, the National Guard, private contractors and other federal agencies to supply staffing and equipment.

He said his biggest mistake was in waiting until the end of the day Tuesday, Aug. 30, to explicitly ask the White House to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.

Of his resignation, Brown said, "I said I was leaving because I don't want to be a distraction. I want to focus on what happened here and the issues that this raises."

A spokesman for Blanco denied Brown's description of disarray in Louisiana's emergency-response operation. "That is just totally inaccurate," said Bob Mann, her communications director in Baton Rouge. "Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him."

In Washington, Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, said there was no delay in the federal response. "We pushed absolutely everything we could -- every employee, every asset, every effort, to save and sustain lives," he said. As Brown recounted it, the weekend before New Orleans' levees burst, FEMA sent an emergency-response team of 10 or 20 people to Louisiana to review evacuation plans with local officials.

By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early Sunday, Brown said he grew so frustrated with local authorities' failure to make the evacuation mandatory that he called President Bush for help.

"Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Brown said he asked Bush.

"Mike, you want me to call the mayor?" the president responded in surprise, Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.